After all, if a person had the power to do something constructive about his complaint, he would be doing it, instead of wasting his time complaining. “It comes from weakness.” Indeed, for Nietzsche, there could be no clearer sign of weakness than complaining. “Complaining is never of any use,” he declared. Probably no philosopher wrote as extensively on complaint as Nietzsche, who dismissed it as a futile coping mechanism for the weak. Even crying out from a physical injury was a failure as far as the hyperdisciplined moralist was concerned. Kant wrote that complaint was “unworthy” of the dignified, virtuous person. Aristotle claimed that whining was typical of “the weaker sex and the effeminate sort of man.” The Stoics also took a firm anti-complaint stance, believing that misery grows from preoccupation with matters that are beyond our control. Philosophers, too, have mostly advised against complaining. (Could Thumper’s curious inability to control the hammering of his left hind paw have been a tic developed in response to his parents’ emotional repression?) “Saying nothing” is exactly what despots and dictators have always wanted us to do. I was raised on Thumper’s Law, named for the Disney bunny who is made to repeat his father’s admonition: “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” In retrospect, this advice seems transparently reactionary, if not emotionally cruel. Or even worse, we are rebuked for our griping. Most of us are more familiar with the outraged email that goes ignored, the hours spent on hold with customer service, the plea for sympathy that draws only an indifferent shrug. He earned the patronage of royals such as Alfonso II of Aragon and took home many prizes for balladry and poetry, which, his biographer assures us, he conscientiously remitted “to the treasury of his cloister.”Ĭomplaining does not always pay off so handsomely. If there had been anything like a Troubadour Top 40, the monk would have been a regular. Among the Monk’s lyrical targets: “the hoarse man who tries to sing,” “too much water in too little wine,” “husbands who love their wives too well,” and “little meat in a large dish.” His talent served him, and his monastery, well. He could find fault in just about anyone and anything, and better still he possessed a genius for making poetry of his complaints. The Monk of Montaudon was the acknowledged master of the form. The genre became a favorite among troubadours and their audiences, and in the early 13th century most every court in medieval Europe had to have its own bard of bellyachery entertaining the lords and ladies with their songs of petty grievance. The name comes from the Old Occitan for “vexation,” and it was characterized by the cataloging of unrelated complaints. The Monk of Montaudon, as the composer is known to history, had developed a new category of songcraft called the enueg. “Or a priest who lies and perjures himself.” His lyrics went on in this vexed fashion, verse after verse, litanies of irritation. “I can’t stand a long wait,” goes one of the monk’s compositions. Sometime around the year 1180, a Benedictine monk in southern France began writing songs about the many things that annoyed him.
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